Testing Scripture: A Scientist Explores the Bible — by John Polkinghorne

Chapter 7- Cross and Resurrection

Polkinghorne begins this chapter by observing that all the Gospels are in the active voice in the course of Jesus’ public ministry.  This relates to his authoritative words and powerful deeds.  However, when the narratives reach the final week in Jerusalem, the voice changes and the verbs become passive.  Things happen to Jesus, as he is subjected to an unjust trial and handed over to suffering and death.  The Gospels all attach profound significance to this last week.

Polkinghorne also notes what a tortuous means of death the Romans had devised in crucifixion.  Death was by asphyxiation when the person could no longer raise themselves up against the nails in the feet to take a breath.  It was ironically cruel in that the stronger, mentally and physically, the person was the longer it took to die.  It has been said some would linger days in perpetual pain, unless the Roman soldiers became tired of the sport and broke their legs with a sledgehammer.

A first century Jew would have interpreted crucifixion as a sign of divine rejection, as it says in Deuteronomy 21:23 that “cursed is anyone hung on a tree”.  It is hard for us to imagine today, where the cross is a religious symbol, how much the word was regarded with sinister horror in that ancient Roman world.  There is no depiction of the crucified Christ in Christian art until the centuries in which crucifixion was no longer a contemporary reality.  Jesus’ contemporaries would have simply concluded that he was a Messianic pretender (one of many at that time) whose grandiose claims had proved to be empty.

So what explains the frightened disciples’ transformation into fearless proclaimers of the Lordship of Jesus?  Why wouldn’t stealing the body and asserting he rose from the dead have worked for the dozens of other Messianic pretenders at the time?  Or that their fond memories of “teacher” morphed into the legend that he rose from the dead?  Why did that just work for only the followers of Jesus?  Polkinghorne says we need to investigate whether there is evidence that might rightly motivate us to believe that Jesus being raised from the dead to a life of unending glory was indeed the case.  I agree we should undertake an investigation of the claim that Jesus rose from the dead based on what we can glean from historical documents.  But let’s not pretend there is anything objective about this investigation.  Everybody, and I mean everybody, is working their own agenda here.  The religious skeptic no less than the Christian apologist.  And it begins right at the first assessment of the extant documentation.  Because no non-Christian Roman historian or politician has much to say about the Jesus cult, much less anything favorable, then that means the written record we do have isn’t “sufficiently attested” by supporting documentation.  To which I call bullshit.  Yes, my belief in Jesus’ resurrection is just that—a religious belief.  I cannot “prove” it in any sense that word has now come to mean.  And yes, the burden of proof is on me, and my fellow co-religionists, since we are making an extraordinary claim.  But the New Testament is as a “historical” a collection of documents as any other ancient collection or document, and you, the skeptics, are just going to have to live with that.  No amount of “Jesus Seminar” shenanigans or “liberal scholarship” is going to undo that fact any more than any amount of apologetics is going to provide evidence that demands (a favorable) verdict.  It was then, still is, and always will be, a matter of faith and that is that. /rant off/

So is it a reasonable well motivated belief?  Polkinghorne points out the earliest statement of the Resurrection that we have occurs in the Pauline writings.  Writings, which by the way, predate the Gospels, and date back to at least the year 55.  Paul reminds the Corinthians:

1 Corinthians 15:3 For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, 4 that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, 5 and that he appeared to Cephas,[b] and then to the Twelve. 6 After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. 7 Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, 8 and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born.

When Paul refers to “For what I received…” he is referring to teaching he received after his dramatic conversion on the road to Damascus.  That would take the quoted testimony back to within a very few years (maybe as little as 3 years) of the events themselves.  This antiquity receives some confirmation in the use of the Aramaic “Cephas” for Peter and the reference to the apostles as “the twelve”, usages that soon died out in the early Christian community.  So much for the usual canard that the Resurrection was a “later” addition to the Gospels.  It clearly was there from the beginning.

Polkinghorne then turns to the Gospels themselves.  As anyone knows who has any kind of familiarity with the Gospels, they do not harmonize.  The skeptics make much of Mark not having an appearance story; verses 16:9-20 are known to be second century additions. Nevertheless, Mark twice records the promise that the risen Christ will meet with disciples in Galilee (14:28 and 16:7).  To me, personally, the lack of harmonization is further evidence that the early Christians took the transmittal of the truth of the basic fact of the Resurrection seriously.  They preserved the differences, they did not conflate them, which is just what honest people would do.  Honest people who were trustworthy and can be believed.  Polkinghorne says:

At first sight it might seem that we are simply confronted with a bunch of variously made-up tales, constructed by different Christian communities as ways of expressing their conviction that in some way Jesus continued to be their living Lord.  However, there is an unexpected and persistent feature of the stories that persuades me that their historicity needs to be taken seriously.  This feature is that initially it was difficult to recognize the risen Christ for who he was… Most of the stories climax in a moment of recognition when it dawns on the participants who they are with.  This seems to me to be a very unlikely feature to be found in a collection of independently made-up tales.  I believe that it is an actual historical reminiscence of what those encounters were like, and so I conclude that the appearance stories have real evidential value and need to be taken with great seriousness.

The second line of evidence Polkinghorne points out is the story of the discovery of the empty tomb.  All though there are differences in detail, they all agree that the tomb was empty.  It is striking that the initial reaction of the women was not joy but fear.  They were not expecting resurrection.  However, he points out there are a number of problems that need to be discussed before the value of the empty tomb stories can be properly assessed.

The first is whether there was, in fact, an identifiable tomb at all.  It was common for the Romans to bury criminals in unmarked tombs or just leave their bodies to eaten by scavengers.  Yet we know from archaeological evidence that this was not an invariable practice.  That all four Gospels speak of Joseph of Arimathea as providing a tomb is a compelling reason.  He is otherwise an unknown figure of no significance in the early Christian movement and the best reason for his association with this courageous and honorable act is surely to believe he actually did it.

A second problem is that Paul makes no reference to the empty tomb in his epistles.  Yet these are occasional writings for specific purposes, not the histories of everything.  Moreover, in 1 Corinthians 15, Paul did say Jesus was buried.  He would not have believed Jesus was alive, if in fact, his body was moldering in a tomb.

The early controversy was not over whether there was an empty tomb, but why it was empty.  The accusation was that the disciples stole the body, or the women went to the wrong tomb.  Polkinghorne says:

It seems to me that the idea of apostolic deceit is simply incredible in view of their later steadfast Christian confession, even to the point of martyrdom.  Equally unconvincing is the suggestion that the women just make a mistake and went to the wrong tomb.  The authorities would then have soon acted to quash the troublesome Christian movement by exhibiting the real tomb with its corpse inside, if that had been the case.

As I have heard it said, “Plenty of people will die for what they believe to be the truth, no one dies for what they know to be a lie”.

But the most powerful argument for the authenticity of the empty tomb is that it is the women who are the witnesses.  In the ancient world women were not regarded as being reliable witnesses; their testimony was not accepted in a court of law.  So anyone making up a tale would make sure it was men who played the key role in it.  The women are there, I believe, because they were indeed the ones who made the startling discovery.  Polkinghorne concludes:

There is, therefore, evidential motivation for believing that Jesus was indeed raised from the dead.  How one weighs that evidence will, however, also depend on how such a counter-intuitive belief (in fact as unexpected in the first century as it is in ours) might be accommodated within one’s world view of the nature of reality.  Those who are committed to an unrevisable belief in the absolute uniformity of nature will be driven to invoke the category of legend as the only way to interpret the gospel stories.  However, to take this stance is to approach the scripture with a mind already closed to what it has to say.

Testing Scripture: A Scientist Explores the Bible — by John Polkinghorne

Chapter 6- The Gospels

Polkinghorne begins this chapter with the observation that no literature in the ancient world has been subjected to such intense scholarly scrutiny as the four Gospels.  For at least the last two hundred years, critical study has concentrated on seeking to analyze and evaluate what can be reliably learned from the Gospels, especially about the historical Jesus of Nazareth.  Many scholars have adopted what Polkinghorne calls a strategy of relentless skepticism.  But he believes to adopt such a stance is, in fact, disastrous, for it induces a kind of intellectual paralysis.  It’s a type of intellectual nihilism, where nothing can be believed because there is no chance of anything being demonstrated to be believable.  No other literature of the past is subjected to, or judged according to, this withering and relentless skepticism.  If it were, we could know nothing or learn anything from the past.  Perhaps, being a geologist, I’m more sensitive to the disaster of extreme empiricism.  In the business, we call it paralysis by analysis.  Geology deals with indirect evidence and is largely a science of induction about past events based on the traces left by those events in the present.  We use remote sensing tools like ground penetrating radar, magnetic induction, and resistivity measurement to induce what lies beneath the surface of the earth.  We probe with core drilling and down-hole geophysics to assess sub-surface conditions at spot locations and then interpolate and/or extrapolate the findings to give a coherent picture.  Is it 100% accurate?  Never.  Is it good enough to establish a well-motivated belief that allows us to act?  Yes.  And so Polkinghorne believes the rational strategy is to commit oneself to what one considers to be a well-motivated belief, while being aware that sometimes it may need revision in the light of further evidence and insight.  This is the spirit in which he seeks to approach the Gospels.  He says:

The traditional assignments of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John only originated from statements made in the second century, where we are also told that Mark was closely associated with the apostle Peter and derived much of his material from him.  There is much scholarly discussion about what to make of these claims, for the evidence they present is fragmentary and indirect.  I think the essential question is not the identity of the particular person who wrote a particular text but the historical reliability of what was written.  This is an issue to which we shall pay careful attention.

Even a casual reader will perceive that Matthew, Mark, and Luke share a good deal of similarities while John is distinctly different.  The Synoptic Gospels show Jesus as rooted in first century Jewish life, giving much of his teaching in homely parables and focusing his message of the coming of the Kingdom.  In John, Jesus speaks in more timeless tones and much of what he says centers on himself.  The series of “I Am” sayings—the bread of life (John 6:35), the light of the world (John 8:12), and so—assert astonishing claims to unique and universal significance, and this attitude is reinforced by repeated depictions of himself as the Son sent by the Father and in intimate relation with Him.  But John’s Jesus is no mere heavenly figure, the Word who was with God and who was God, but also the Word made flesh John 1:1-14).  When Jesus meets the woman of Samaria at the well, he is genuinely tired and thirsty and he has to ask her for a drink (John 4:3-14).

The similarities between the Synoptics probably stem from the fact they share much material in common.  A great deal of Mark’s Gospel reappears in Matthew and Luke, sometimes with interesting small changes in detail; one reason most scholars believe Mark to be the earliest Gospel.  Matthew and Luke have in common a substantial body of material which many scholars believe may derive from an earlier document (often referred to as Q– from German: Quelle, meaning “source”).  Polkinghorne says:

In understanding the Gospels, it is important to realize that they are not biographies written in a modern manner.  Not only do they omit much that such biographies would contain (What did Jesus look like?), but also, in the ancient world, writings about an important person were selective and concentrated simply on what was of central significance for the character portrayed.  Moreover, there was not the modern concern to be absolutely accurate about matters of subsidiary detail.

The essential point that the Gospels are seeking to get across is expressed in John, where it is said, “These things are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name” (20:3).

Polkinghorne gives the example of the curing of blindness in or near Jericho—Matthew 20:29-34, Mark 10:46-52, and Luke 18:35-43.  In Matthew two men are encountered on the way out of Jericho.  In Mark it is one man as they are leaving the city.  In Luke it is one man met on entry to the city.  Clearly, all three are telling essentially the same story, whose deeper significance is that meeting with Jesus brings people out of darkness into light.  We may easily imagine these differences of detail arising in the period of oral transmission prior to the consolidation into written form.  I think we have good reason to believe that they were seeking to tell a reliable story of what happened, expressed within the historical conventions of their time.  Another sign of this is recording sayings of Jesus that were problematic for them, but which had to be included in a truthful account.  For example, in Mark 10:17-20, a man comes to Jesus and asks, “Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life.”  Jesus is said to have responded, “Why do you call me good?  No one is good but God alone.”  Since the early Church believed that Jesus was sinless, this saying must have seemed a hard one to understand, but it had to be reported because it was there in the tradition.  All four Gospels tell the story of Peter’s threefold denial of Jesus.  That was a highly embarrassing incident in the life of one of the early leaders of the Church.  Nevertheless, it had to be recorded because it was what actually happened.

Polkinghorne notes that the most certain fact about the deeds of Jesus is that he was an outstanding healer.  There are so many stories of healings in the Gospels that they could not be excised without destroying the whole fabric of the narratives.  A repeated theme is controversy about healing on the Sabbath.  This was clearly a point of sharp contention between Jesus and the Jewish authorities and this could not have been the case unless there actually were such healings.

Another fact about Jesus that it seems impossible to doubt is his willingness to accept, and even eat with, disreputable sinners, including tax collectors and prostitutes.  We moderns get the part about prostitutes, but it is hard for us to imagine the absolute hatred of the first century Jews towards the “tax collectors”.  First, no one likes to pay money to the government, especially when the government is an oppressive regime like the Roman Empire of the 1st century.  Second, the tax collectors in the Bible were Jews who were working for the hated Romans. These individuals were seen as turncoats, traitors to their own countrymen. Rather than fighting the Roman oppressors, the publicans were helping them—and enriching themselves at the expense of their fellow Jews.  Third, the tax collectors made their living by extracting more money than the Romans were levying.  The Romans didn’t care how much the collectors extracted, as long as they got their cut.  So a rich publican, like Zacchaeus, got rich by using Roman authority and the threat of punishment to gouge his own fellow countryman.  So Jesus’ behavior scandalized his Jewish contemporaries, who strongly disapproved of his acting that way without first insisting on an act of public repentance.  The fact that the original twelve disciples consisted of Matthew, the tax collector, and Simon, the Zealot, who regularly knifed tax collectors is not to be minimized; it is a reflection of who Jesus was and what he stood for.

Lastly, Polkinghorne comments of the birth narratives of Matthew and Luke.  He notes we are so used to conflating the two gospel accounts that is only when we read them carefully and separately that we become aware of how different they are.  Luke seems to tell the story from Mary’s perspective; he likely conducted interviews with her in compiling his accounts.  Matthew seems to see things much more from Joseph’s perspective.

Luke gives us a very specific dating of the birth in relation to a Roman census, but there are severe scholarly difficulties in reconciling this with what is known of ancient history, and with Matthew’s (plausible) statement that it took place during the reign of Herod the Great.  A principal concern in both stories is to explain why, if Mary’s home was at Nazareth, Jesus was born in Bethlehem, as Messianic prophecy required.  Polkinghorne does not doubt that there is historical truth preserved in the birth stories, but establishing its exact content is not an easy task.

Luke, explicitly, and Matthew, more obliquely, both assert the virginal conception of Jesus.  Christian tradition attaches much more significance to this than the rest of the New Testament seems to.  Paul is content simply to lay stress on Jesus’ solidarity with humanity: “God sent his son, born of woman, born under the law” (Galatians 4:4).  Polkinghorne states:

The virginal conception is a powerful myth, and I believe that in the religion of the Incarnation the power of story fuses with the power of a true story, so that the great Christian myths are enacted myths. On this basis, I find myself able to believe in the virgin birth, even if the motivating evidence is less extensive than that for belief in the Resurrection.

I’m with Polkinghorne here as he echoes C.S. Lewis.  The alternative is that Joseph and Mary were bumping uglies ahead of schedule, Mary did the deed with someone else and cheated on Joseph, or Mary was raped and chose to hide that.  The first two make Mary (and Joseph) to be liars, something contrary to the witness of their character.  The third has some plausibility in that societal context, which would try to blame Mary for rape.  So if you want to believe the Virgin Birth is a later accretion by the Church, then have at it; you probably believe the same thing about Jesus’ claim to divinity and the Resurrection.  I’m going to save my rant for the next chapter on the cross and resurrection.

But please don’t try to make some argument about scientific impossibility; of course it’s impossible; hence the term miracle.  I’m in firm agreement with Lewis (from Miracles) here:

The idea that the progress of science has somehow altered this question is closely bound up with the idea that people ‘in olden times’ believed in [miracles] ‘because they didn’t know the laws of Nature.’ Thus you will hear people say, ‘The early Christians believed that Christ was the son of a virgin, but we know that this is a scientific impossibility.’ Such people seem to have an idea that belief in miracles arose at a period when men were so ignorant of the cause of nature that they did not perceive a miracle to be contrary to it. A moment’s thought shows this to be nonsense: and the story of the Virgin Birth is a particularly striking example. When St. Joseph discovered that his fiancée was going to have a baby, he not unnaturally decided to repudiate her. Why? Because he knew just as well as any modern gynaecologist that in the ordinary course of nature women do not have babies unless they have lain with men.

No doubt the modern gynaecologist knows several things about birth and begetting which St. Joseph did not know. But those things do not concern the main point– that a virgin birth is contrary to the course of nature. And St. Joseph obviously knew that. In any sense in which it is true to say now, ‘The thing is scientifically impossible,’ he would have said the same: the thing always was, and was always known to be, impossible unless the regular processes of nature were, in this particular case, being over-ruled or supplemented by something from beyond nature.

When St. Joseph finally accepted the view that his fiancée’s pregnancy was due not to unchastity but to a miracle, he accepted the miracle as something contrary to the known order of nature… as evidence of supernatural power… Nothing can seem extraordinary until you have discovered what is ordinary. Belief in miracles, far from depending on an ignorance of the laws of nature, is only possible in so far as those laws are known…

…the grounds for belief and disbelief are the same to-day as they were two thousand – or ten thousand – years ago. If St. Joseph had lacked faith to trust God or humility to perceive the holiness of his spouse, he could have disbelieved in the miraculous origin of her Son as easily as any modern man; and any modern man who believes in God can accept the miracle as easily as St. Joseph did…

As a modern man, who is a scientist, I accept the miracle.